Wolf: The Lives of Jack London

by James L. Haley Coffin

  9

  THE WAR CORRESPONDENT

  After his scarifying adventure investigating The People of the Abyss, London did not neglect his previous commitment to John Spargo of The Comrade to prepare a statement on how he had become a socialist. England had sharpened his sensibilities, he wrote, but his conversion had happened many years before, on the road first with Kelly ’s Army and then tramping on his own.

  I had good health and hard muscles. . . . I loved life in the open, and I toiled in the open, at the hardest kinds of work. Learning no trade, but drifting along from job to job, I looked on the world and called it good, every bit of it. . . . I was healthy and strong, bothered with neither aches nor weaknesses.

  And because of all this, exulting in my young life, able to hold my own at work or fight, I was a rampant individualist. . . . I could see myself only raging through life without end like one of Nietzsche’s Blond Beasts, lustfully roving and conquering by sheer superiority and strength.

  As for the unfortunates, the sick, and ailing, and old, and maimed, I must confess I hardly thought of them at all, save that I vaguely felt that they, barring accidents, could be as good as I if they wanted to real hard. . . . I was as faithful a wage slave as ever capitalist exploited.

  Just about this time . . . just turned eighteen, I took it into my head to go tramping. . . . And on this new Blond-Beast adventure I found myself looking upon life from a new and totally different angle. I had dropped down from the proletariat into what sociologists love to call the “submerged tenth,” and I was startled to discover the way in which that submerged tenth was recruited.

  I found there all sorts of men, many of whom had once been as good as myself and just as Blond-Beast; sailor-men, soldier-men, labor-men, all wrenched and distorted and twisted out of shape by toil and hardship and accident, and cast adrift by their masters like so many old horses. . . . And I confess a terror seized me. What when my strength failed?

  The harder he had worked at a dime an hour, he realized, the lower into the social pit he’d slid. London’s concept of socialism as it evolved was never the socialism of the slacker. He did not oppose the finer things in life, indeed he wanted them for himself, and once he determined to work with his brain instead of his back, he had labored mightily to obtain some luxuries for himself. But everyone, he believed, should have an equal opportunity for the good life, which the current system of labor exploitation rendered manifestly impossible. Fortunes gained by sweat and brilliance were acceptable; fortunes gained by capitalizing on the desperation of others were not. And he felt little loyalty to the political system that sanctified the existing economy. In the article for Spargo, London bitterly recounted his imprisonment in Buffalo, where he “was nabbed by a fee-hunting constable, denied the right to plead guilty or not guilty, sentenced out of hand to thirty days . . . and put to work under the eyes of guards armed with Winchester rifles.” After that experience, he wrote, people need not wonder why “some of his plethoric national patriotism simmered down and leaked out the bottom of his soul somewhere.”1

  He saw the cycle: physical labor was leading him only to the bottom of the indigents’ pit. He learned it from the men with whom he camped and rode the rails. He had gone tramping for adventure and met men who were forced into it because their strength had given out. In their desperation and hunger he saw his own future, and swore an oath: “May God strike me dead if I do another day’s hard work with my body.” That was when he turned all his faculties toward becoming a writer. Five years after making that commitment, such eventual ruin seemed highly unlikely, for mighty news was coming in: The Call of the Wild was a smash hit. The sales, as well as the reviews, were extravagant.

  The story recounts the adventures and transformation of Buck, half St. Bernard and half sheepdog, the pampered pet of a kindly judge’s family in Santa Clara, California. Kidnapped by the gardener and sold into the Alaska sled-dog trade, Buck is thrust into a world of savagery. Traded to a series of owners who represent various faces of the white man in the North, Buck learns to survive in a world where dogs, when not in harness, are left to work out their rivalries and dominance by themselves. Eventually he is owned by a trio of Americans who have no business in the North, a woman named Mercedes and her husband and brother, whose joint incompetence kills off their dog team one by one. Buck is taken from these foolish cheechakoes by John Thornton, a manly master to whom Buck can devote himself and be fully requited.

  Buck’s affections are divided, however. Life at the edge of the wilderness exerts a pull on him, in the proximity of wolves calling him to revert to his most primitive state. When Yeehat Indians kill Thornton and loot his camp, Buck slaughters them and gives himself over to his destiny as master of wolves.

  Dark and bleak, yet weirdly credible, The Call of the Wild stunned the public like a one-two punch. By telling the story from Buck’s point of view, London struck to the late Victorians’ soft heart for anthropomorphic animal tales, while his own skill for riveting narrative made them believe the story while their guard was down. Not for nothing had he been taking boxing lessons from Jim Whitaker.

  One reader stricken by the story was London’s high school acquaintance Georgia Loring. She had grown up to marry Frederick Irons Bamford, the reference librarian in Oakland, who had picked up where Ina Coolbrith had left off as London’s literary coach. Leery of London before, Georgia Bamford was so converted by the woolly tale that she pronounced herself ready to forgive even his vehement socialism. “How could he do it? By what magic of words could he make me feel that the dog was no longer a dog, but a fellow creature with all the feelings of a human being? . . . No book that I have read seems to have exerted the same power over me. I shall never forget it.”

  Left breathless by The Call of the Wild, Georgia Bamford could hardly wait to read The People of the Abyss, having seen the laudatory reviews. Her newfound esteem for London abruptly evaporated, so shocked was she that he could find such people a fit subject for commentary. “I could see no reason for such a book; it served no purpose and was not literature.”2 It was an early manifestation of a phenomenon that haunted London’s whole career, then and for the rest of his life: the audience who craved entertainment did not care to read about the troubles of the world. He could bountifully satisfy what they wanted, but they refused to listen to what they needed to hear, and what he needed to tell them.

  One effect of the runaway success of The Call of the Wild was London’s full assimilation by his peers in San Francisco. His extraordinary output reversed the valence of the attraction between London and The Crowd: where he had once desired to be accepted by them, suddenly he had achieved recognition beyond any of them, and The Crowd courted him with an even greater fervor. His publication of one volume of short stories in each of the years 1900, 1901, and 1902, in addition to A Daughter of the Snows, gave him rank above the others, except the legendary Ambrose Bierce and the poet Joaquin Miller. The year 1902 also saw publication of The Cruise of the Dazzler, an action tale based on his own oyster-pirating youth on San Francisco Bay, and in which the title boat was an iteration of his own sloop Razzle Dazzle. The effort won him recognition as an author for juvenile readers. It was an extraordinary output.

  For the newly hailed hero, the most visible effect of his new popularity was the final strain it put on his dying marriage. In February 1903 London’s first fan, Cloudesley Johns, arrived for a visit at the Piedmont Lodge procured for the Londons by George Sterling; they played good hosts and he suspected no troubles, but the rift was all but complete. That summer, London moved Bessie and the girls for the summer up to Wake Robin Lodge, a property in Glen Ellen, north of the Bay Area, that had several rental cottages; it belonged to Overland Monthly editor Ninetta Eames, now his friend and frequent publisher. When boyhood friend Frank Atherton, now with a wife and baby, visited him, he found London flying kites—a hobby he had acquired and to which he was passionately attached. With six kites in the air, London talked Atherton into taking ov
er the lease on the bungalow, and later moved Atherton’s family into a flat with him on Telegraph Avenue in Oakland.

  One measure of his deep personal misery in the wake of separating from Bess was that after they were all settled into the apartment, London took Atherton on a tour of the old bars, imbibed to his limit, and resumed the oyster pirate’s habit of buying rounds for the house—and buying affection with them.

  London also began laying plans to take some mistress out on the Spray to release some long-pent-up tension. He had no idea who it would be—there was Blanche Partington, witty, attractive, cultured member of The Crowd; or there was Ninetta Eames’s niece Charmian Kittredge, who was a bit horse-faced, but she had a good figure and was wonderfully intelligent—he didn’t care who it was.

  As he was acquiring supplies for the excursion, his eye out for any female he could importune into accompanying him, his design fell, with him, in a brutal tumble from his buggy that strained, sprained, or extensively skinned both arms and both legs. As it happened, Bessie had asked Charmian to take some things down to Oakland to Jack, which she did. London was in a sour humor; he and Charmian had a short conversation, mostly about what he did not like about her, at the end of which he kissed her. Charmian Kittredge, who like London was the offspring of parents who had dabbled in free love, was no wall-flower. Over the course of a couple more visits they discussed, rationally, their growing animal attraction to one another. More than that, London found himself falling in love—a concept he had once argued against.

  Around The Crowd but not of The Crowd, Charmian had much to recommend her to London’s notice. She was intelligent, and forthright and articulate in expressing her opinions. She was a horsewoman and a concert-quality pianist. She had a sharp editorial eye, having helped her aunt Ninetta in editing the Overland Monthly—in which capacity she developed almost unbelievable speed and accuracy on a typewriter. She could be refreshingly earthy in a society where women were expected to be prudes, and she had a rich sense of humor and a keenness for daring and adventure that he found remarkable in a woman. She was altogether different from both the brilliant but repressed Anna Strunsky and his increasingly distant and carping wife. The physical affair that ignited was rich and lusty, but London also found himself sharing his feelings honestly and fully with a woman capable of bearing them. To Charmian’s misfortune, however, they opened their relationship just as he fell into the clutches of a dark, tenacious depression, what he later called his Great Sickness, and her strength and commitment were tested almost from the beginning.

  The admiration of friends, the political sympathy and reassurance of comrades, the romantic possibilities that beckoned him outside his mummified relationship with Bessie, were all elements of happiness that had, in the main, eluded him up to this point. When he found, to his bewilderment, that once he had them they did not make him happy, the discovery caused him to examine—closely, earnestly, honestly examine—what it was he wanted from life. Early in July 1903, he tried to articulate in a letter to Charmian what he had concluded. He wrote that in previous years he had tried to explain it to other women he had loved, and been rewarded with their passionate anger:Shall I tell you a dream of my boyhood and manhood?—a dream which in my rashness I thought had dreamed itself out and beyond all chance of realization? Let me. I do not know, now, what my other loves have been, how much of depth and worth there were in them; but this I know, and knew then, and knew always—that there was a something greater that I yearned after, a something that beat upon my imagination with a great glowing light and made those woman-loves wan things and pale, oh so pitiably wan and pale! . . .

  For I had dreamed of the great Man-Comrade. I, who have been comrade with many men, and a good comrade I believe, have never had a comrade at all, and in the deeper significance of it have never been able to be the comrade I was capable of being. Always it was here this one failed, and there that one failed until all failed. . . . It was plain that it was not possible. I could never hope to find that comradeship, that closeness, that sympathy and understanding, whereby the man and I might merge and become one for love and life.

  How can I say what I mean? This man should be so much one with me that we could never misunderstand. He should love the flesh, as he should the spirit, honoring and loving each and giving each its due. . . . A man who had no smallnesses or meannesses, who could sin greatly, perhaps, but who could as greatly forgive.3

  It was a breathtaking thing for a man to entrust to the woman he had been seriously courting, but Charmian, guided by an unerring sense of navigation that steered her to prove herself wiser than her predecessors, accepted his dream. His next letter to her was awash in relief. It had always been his fate, he wrote, for good or ill, to be able to win love easily. In consequence he had theretofore easily won the love of shy, innocent, sweetly silly little girls. “But YOU, YOU who are so much more, who know life and have looked it squarely in the face, who are open-eyed and worldly wise . . . that YOU should love me . . . Pride? Oh, if you could but know the pride I take in this!”4

  The man who had awakened this long-dormant dream, though it had remained painful in its long dormancy, could only have been George Sterling—brilliant, sympathetic, impossibly beautiful, old enough (six years older than London) to be a mentor and yet young enough to be the soul mate he now admitted he had always pined for. London could survey his whole life of acquaintances, from wharf rats and hoodlums to men of the sea to overeducated tramps to cheechakoes and frostbitten prospectors, and realize that Sterling alone held the potential to embrace a soul as vast and complex as his own. But how to voice such incendiary feelings? How to even probe whether such a deep relationship was possible? London chewed the matter over for only a few more days before, just as The Call of the Wild hit the bookstores, trusting Sterling with a letter no less remarkable—and risky—than the one he had written Charmian: “You know that I do not know you—no more than you know me. We have never really touched the intimately personal note in all the time of our friendship. I suppose we never shall. And I speculate and speculate, trying to make you out, trying to lay hands on the inner side of you—what you are to yourself, in short. Sometimes I conclude that you have a cunning and deep philosophy of life, for yourself alone, worked out on a basis of disappointment and disillusion . . . and then it all goes glimmering, and I think that you . . . are living your life out blindly and naturally. So I do not know you, George; and for that matter I do not know how I came to write this.”5 It was the kind of letter that most men, if they had dared write it at all, would have read over, wadded up tightly, and buried in the wastebasket. But something impelled London to trust Sterling with the whole matter; if ever he was to give his dream a chance, it must be now.

  Sterling was charmed. He welcomed the intimacy of the suddenly most famous writer in America. And as their once-cordial friendship deepened into something much more, there was an outlet for all of London’s easy affability, his sincerity, and his inquisitiveness, to which Sterling responded with all his wit and verve. Sterling began editing London’s daily output and demonstrated a keen skill and dedication. London began calling him the Greek, on account of Sterling’s classical beauty; Sterling began referring to London as Wolf, an endearment previously reserved only for Charmian. For the time being, it seemed as though London’s dream might have finally become a reality. On Christmas Eve, the Greek presented him a volume of his new collection of verse, The Testimony of the Suns and Other Poems. He inscribed it, “To our genius, Jack London. Here’s my book. My heart you have already. Piedmont, Cal., Dec. 24th, 1903.”6

  For all the felicity of their literary interlude, the real world now intruded, an unwelcome guest with bills to pay, and an estranged wife and two daughters to support, in addition to still contributing to his mother’s needs. The Call of the Wild, though it made Jack London a household name, did not make him rich. George Brett had not been convinced of its marketability, and instead of the usual royalty contract had bought it for a $2,000
lump sum, with the promise of extensive publicity. Neither he nor London foresaw the phenomenon it would become, and had there been a standard royalty contract, London would have gained wealth commensurate with even his powerful imagination. But the author was not dissatisfied with the lump payment. “I do hope you’ll make a strike on that dog story,” he wrote Brett at the time, “for you have been such help to me that I want to see you getting some adequate return.”7

  Celebrity though he now was, London needed work. The Call of the Wild had been written outside the six-book sequence once outlined to Brett; not so the great sea novel that was the principal topic of his first big proposal. Originally he had intended to call it The Mercy of the Sea, but as its main character Wolf Larsen began to dominate the story, it evolved into The Sea-Wolf. Much of the composition took place on a folding camp stool at a portable writing desk in the woods surrounding his rented cabin at Wake Robin Lodge, where he sought refuge after finally separating from Bessie; the rest he wrote onboard the Spray during several weeks on a cruise with Cloudesley Johns, who came up for one of his regular visits. The story was scheduled to begin serialization in Century in January, but the serial would not conclude and the book, with its royalties to tap into, would not be published until well into the fall. He needed work immediately, and at that opportune moment the job of war correspondent presented itself.